Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Ram Karan Kabir has alleged that cows from a state-run shelter home in Naraini block of Banda were buried alive by officials and left to die after they exhausted funds to feed them.
In a letter to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the legislator said that he had himself rescued cows who were buried in a pit, dug with the help of JCBs (backhoe).
“The involvement of local officials cannot be ruled out,” Kabir said in his letter written on December 7 and demanded a high-level probe into the incident and asked why the bovines were left to die.
Kabir said that around 250 cows from a temporary cowshed operated by the nagar panchayat in Nairaini block of Banda were transported by nine trucks and taken to neighbouring Panna Tiger Reserve in Panna (Madhya Pradesh).
“The officials dug pits with the help of JCBs and buried around 50 sick and weak cows there. There is anger among villagers over this incident. I went to the spot and rescued the cows. This barbaric act has maligned the image of the government. A probe should be immediately initiated into the incident and strict action should be taken against the guilty,” the BJP lawmaker wrote in his letter.
The incident has come at a time when the Yogi Adityanath government has been claiming that it has protected the lives of gauvansh (cow). Recently, Yogi had issued orders asking district officials to protect cows from the cold wave. Even in UP’s budget for 2020-2021, the government had allocated no less than Rs 700 crore for building and maintaining cow shelters, apart from imposing a 2 per cent cess on the purchase of beer and Indian Made Foreign Liquor to create a corpus for cow protection.
Stray cattle have been a big issue in villages and the opposition parties have made it a political issue. Recently on November 24, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav had tweeted pictures of stray cattle roaming around in city roads while in another post on December 5, he tweeted pictures of stray cattle creating ruckus in Shikarpur tehsil of Bulandshahr.
As per government dossiers, there are 5,000 temporary cow shelters having roughly 3,00,000 cattle. Besides, there are 92 Kanha Gaushalas run by state municipal bodies housing nearly 21,000 cattle while 434 ‘kanji houses’ (stray cattle houses) are operational and have more than 3,600 cattle.